Koatanga wrote:then if you have the paper, you should legally be allowed to download and enjoy the electronic version and copies thereof for personal use.

At least that's the way I look at it - we have thousands of books around the house - buying electronic copies of all of them would be horrendously expensive. I don't mind downloading books that I already own.

Two issues with that: Is downloading somebody else's copy legally the same as copying your own?

And if you torrent it, you will share it with somebody else, which is definetly illegal.

Paxen wrote:And if you torrent it, you will share it with somebody else, which is definetly illegal.

If anyone can get the whole thing from me in the time I torrent it, they'd be pretty lucky. I have a data-capped internet plan, so I am an extremely bad torrent sharer. I download, then remove the torrent. I may share 1% of what I downloaded, but that doesn't bother me - they would have got the 1% from the source I was downloading from anyway.

Until they get rid of this DRM garbage, my heart isn't going to bleed for publishers one bit.

I bought a book from Amazon that my wife wanted. She has a Kindle Touch, but has never eneabled the wifi on it because she likes not having the adverts on it. So everything gets downloaded from her PC. Well, it turns out there really isn't a way to get the book on her Touch without hooking her up to the net and putting adverts on her idle screen. So I downloaded a pirated copy of the book and put it on her kindle. Doesn't bother me, because I bought the electronic book. But the whole thing was an exercise in frustration that illustrated quite clearly to me how much DRM sucks.

We're buyers. We like to support people who produce what we like. We buy books, music, and movies. But when it's made too hard for us to go through legal channels, we will go elsewhere.

Fridmarr wrote:That's not gray, it's fine. Otherwise the concept of having a backup would be utterly useless.

Actually, I think it depends on the displosal method of the original books. If the books are sold, then the right to own the work is sold along with it, so keeping the electronic copies would not be legal. I believe even donating the books would constitute a transfer of rights to hold copies of them.

If they were destroyed, then I believe it would be legal, since the right to have a copy of the book never transferred. However, it would also be nearly impossible to prove you once owned the destroyed book and didn't in fact sell it.

Koatanga wrote:Actually, I think it depends on the displosal method of the original books. If the books are sold, then the right to own the work is sold along with it, so keeping the electronic copies would not be legal. I believe even donating the books would constitute a transfer of rights to hold copies of them.

Yes, obviously selling the book would transfer your right to the copy as well.

Koatanga wrote:If they were destroyed, then I believe it would be legal, since the right to have a copy of the book never transferred. However, it would also be nearly impossible to prove you once owned the destroyed book and didn't in fact sell it.

Right, but that's the rub in this whole thing, even when you have a paper copy in hand. There's no reason why a publisher needs to provide anyone access to digital copy of something that they have on paper (after all you have always been able to copy paper text manually) anyhow, so it's kind of moot.

Fridmarr wrote:Right, but that's the rub in this whole thing, even when you have a paper copy in hand. There's no reason why a publisher needs to provide anyone access to digital copy of something that they have on paper (after all you have always been able to copy paper text manually) anyhow, so it's kind of moot.

The publisher is under no obligation to provide them, but they are readily available online through torrent sites and other places. I am of the opinion it would/should be legal to possess the electronic copies if you own the paper, regardless of where you obtain the electronic copies.

It's the legality of possessing the electronic copies once the original paper is disposed of that is in question, as I believe Skye would actually like to recover some bookshelf space.

That's where I have the problem, because the only legal way to dispose of the books while maintaining a legal right to the electronic version would be to destroy the books, which is a something I am vehemently against.

I suppose I will have to get over that, as the future of books has got to be in the digital medium, but I don't forsee a day in which I will throw away or destroy any of the thousands of books I have. They'll probably live in boxes at some point.

I'd more than likely donate them (most likely option) or sell them, as I personally don't prefer to destroy books. Used to work in a bookstore that would allow us one "free" book every so often, but we'd have to rip the front cover off to get it... I never opted for this route, instead choosing to read them in the store or purchase them outright.

Regardless of how I disposed of them, I would no longer have proof of ownership. This, of course, all comes down to if anyone ever checked up on it or not, but in the event that it did happen, I'd have no way to prove it, unless I kept the receipts for every book I've ever purchased (which I haven't...)

Whenever the school libraries would throw out books, I'd grab some -- they would normally put them in a shelf and it was labeled "free book". But district administrators changed the policy latter on the books, the libraries had to send the books to fixed assets first for disposal, and if you wanted a book, you basically had to go dumpster diving for them...

Before that, I managed to salvage several books on WW2, Theology, and compilation works of Borges, Poe and Lovecraft, oh... and And the Band played On, possibly one of the most depressing books ever.

I would love to hear from anyone who has moved their book collection and buying habits to Kindle. Any regrets, advice, stuff to watch out for, that sort of thing. You can't easily take your book collection with you if you move abroad, most paperbacks have next to no resell value and I hate the way the pages discolour with age so like with music, going digital seems really convenient. More importantly I think I would read a lot more.

I would as suggested previously in this topic just download my existing books instead of buying them again so my only start up cost would be for the Kindle itself.

A friend of mine has the kindle and she loves it, I use my work-issued ipad as my ebook reader (hey, free ipad, I aint gonna complain) but it took me a while to get used to it -- at first, I'd get easily tired from reading on it, now i'm used to it.

We have 3 kindles in the house: Original, Touch, and Fire. My daighter has the original that was passed down from my wife when she got her Touch. I have the Fire.

My wife loves her Touch and uses it all the time. I love my Fire and use it all the time. She thinks the Touch is nice to read, while I like the convenience of being able to read without a light on. I also like that my Fire can view the video content I stream on my network, and that I can play android games on it.

Since becoming a Kindle family, my reading has gone WAY up. My reading time is at night mainly, before I go to sleep. Having a backlit device means I don't bother my wife when I read, I don't nod off and lose my place, I don't have a stack of books on my nightstand, and I feel free to read just a few pages and put it down if I am particularly tired.

The kindle is also convenient to toss into my laptop bag, so I can read when I am between clients.

I use the Calibre program (open source book manager) on my PC to organise my library. It can download metadata (series, reviews, synopsis, ratings, etc.) and store it with the books. It's also good for searching.

My only complaint is DRM-protected books when sharing them around the family. It's a pain, so we avoid them.

I like my Kindle enough to say I believe that printed books will go the way of vynil records in the not-so-distant future. It's a better experience for me than reading a real book. The ability to change font and size alone makes the Kindle superior to printed counterparts, particularly for those of us without perfect vision.

Klaudandus wrote:Whenever the school libraries would throw out books, I'd grab some -- they would normally put them in a shelf and it was labeled "free book". But district administrators changed the policy latter on the books, the libraries had to send the books to fixed assets first for disposal, and if you wanted a book, you basically had to go dumpster diving for them...

Before that, I managed to salvage several books on WW2, Theology, and compilation works of Borges, Poe and Lovecraft, oh... and And the Band played On, possibly one of the most depressing books ever.

apparently this occurs similarly in libraries and at least some bookstores: the publishers give them a break on stuff, but they need to prove it's not being 'given away' or sold by destroying it in an approved manner.

I have some friends who work in libraries who've also told me about how they periodically destroy donations because apparently they have restrictions on the ability to sell them and someone decided that setting up a box o books for free wasn't a good use of resources.

Picked up Edgar Rice Burrough's Barsoom series after seeing John Carter. I splurged and paid .99 USD for an indexed version of the first seven books with illustrations that were made for the series back in 1915-1920 (IIRC).

Seriously enjoying the heck out of it. Apparently there are some decent free versions out there (yay public domain), but most of the ones I found were pretty much garbage (no index, bad formatting, missing pages, packing it with random pictures that they pulled from who-knows-where, etc). Though many of the pay ones weren't much better.

I finished it around the 11th or 12th. It was definitely good. There were definitely a few plot points I didn't like, but overall I felt the book was really a good end to the series. It does move fast and doesn't seem to have the same amount of "luls" that the other books have. The chapter organization is a bit weird. One chapter is almost 200 pages long while the next one is like 4 pages long .

All in all, I was very pleased with it and plan to read it again once I finish re-reading Way of Kings and read the upcoming part 2 of that series. There are a lot of details in MoL that can be missed and affect how you see the story.